Mahir Polat’ın, 2011 yılında alan başlayan ve halen devam eden, “Anadolu’da İslâmi Heterodoks Toplulukların İbadet Yapılarının Mimari Özellikleri” başlıklı doktora tezi, Anadolu coğrafyasında alan araştırmasına dayalı Alevi yerleşimlerinde tarihi ibadet mekanı özellikleri taşıyan yapıların mimari tarihi ağırlıklı tespit ve incelemelerini kapsamaktadır. Bu konuşmada, bugüne kadar akademik dünyada yeteri kadar dikkat çekmeyen bu konunun alan araştırmalarına […]

The diary of Salomea Pilsztynowa (1718 – after 1763) entitled Echo of the Journey and Adventures of My Life reads like a picaresque novel full of drama, romance, danger, and intrigue, narrating the ups and downs of the heroine’s encounters with various characters populating a cosmopolitan yet tumultuous Ottoman Empire. Written in Polish in 1760, […]

What is the role of aesthetics – i.e. the enjoyment of the senses – within the cem ceremony performed by men and women adopting a specific notion of self-discipline? In order to arrive at first preliminary answers, this talk takes as its starting point the ethnographic description of a Bektashi village congregation. In the winter months, the members of […]

D Yrd. Doç. Dr. Meryem Müzeyyen Fındıkgil Zahlreiche, das Stadtbild Istanbuls bis heute prägende, öffentliche Gebäude tragen die Handschrift deutscher Architekten aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Die Architekturhistorikern, Frau Dr. Meryem Müzeyyen Fındıkgil, wird uns in ihrem deutschsprachigen Abendvortrag auf einen virtuellen Rundgang mitnehmen zu einer großen Fülle an berühmteren, wie auch kaum bekannten, baulichen Zeugnissen […]

Over the last decades, the performing arts played a crucial role in the implementation of Alevi visibility in Turkey as well as abroad. Whereas music and sound played a major role in this developments, dance and movement have also been crucial avenues through which Alevi aesthetics became accessible to a larger public. In this lecture, […]

Türkiye’de yaşayan Alevi topluluklarında müzik icrasının boyutlarının tartışılacağı bu sunumda, müzik terminolojisinden çalgılara, müzik icrasından edebi içeriğe kadar geniş bir kavramsal çerçevede “Alevi müziği” konusu irdelenecektir. Özellikle müziğin, Alevi kültürü ve inancının içindeki yeri ile günümüze kadar bu konuda yapılan çalışmaların içeriklerinin sorgulanacağı sunumda, Alevi topluluklarında etnografik müzik araştırmalarının nasıl yapılabileceğine dair bir tartışma yürütülecektir. […]

With a large part of Alevi traditions in today’s Dersim/Tunceli hardly being practiced anymore, most contemporary singers of the region are deeply influenced by the beliefs and aesthetics of the “path of god”. This talk aims to briefly describe former rituals, their (musical) actors, such as pirs/dedes, dervishes and koceks, together with the wide range […]

The study of manuscripts from Alevi communities has undergone a remarkable upswing over the last decades. Increasingly, we learn more about the predominantly religious knowledge that was preserved in writing. The variety of manuscripts known so far is broad: They encompass, among others, notebooks, ritual manuals, poem anthologies, treatises, narratives, epics, certificates, and family trees. […]

Born and raised on the peripheries of the Russian Empire, Ahmet Caferoğlu studied Oriental Linguistics and Literature at the universities of Baku, Istanbul, Berlin, and Breslau. From 1929 up to his death in 1975, Caferoğlu had decisively contributed to shaping Turkish Turkology through his indispensable research on the dialectology of Turkish and on Old Uyghur; […]